Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Sheldon Brown podcast

Many online cycling enthusiasts are familiar with Sheldon "Captain Bike" Brown. Sheldon, who's the ambassador of Harris Cyclery in Massachusetts, has shared his encyclopedic knowledge of everything cycling for years in various online forums. He started doing email listservs in the early 90s via AOL and set up his website in 1994.

Sheldon Brown is now experimenting with podcasts. If you've wondered what he sounds like, here's your chance. In spite of his slightly twisted sense of humor, he sounds amazingly normal in his podcasts.

I haven't listened to the "Bentride" podcast yet. In his English 3-speed podcast, Sheldon talks for several minutes in his grandfatherly professor voice about the history of English 3-speed bikes (imagine that). His audio essay starts out a little slowly. Sheldon sounds as if he's reading from a manuscript (which he probably is) and there are awkward pauses as if he's flipping a page or something. He soon finds his rhythm, however, and the rest of his podcast goes smoothly.

Halfway through the podcast, Sheldon switches gears and covers the discography of the English band Oysterband. The style of this section is reminiscent of public radio classical music shows:
"In 1997, Oysterband came out with the album Deep Dark Ocean. Here's a part of the song 'Sail on By.' [short pause] [cue music]."
The MP3 files are huge so a broadband connection is helpful, but that's true of any kind of podcasting. I'm looking forward to hearing what more Sheldon has for us in the future.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

dude, i'm not gonna check out his podcast until he does an episode on his beard. or lack thereof. or how few moments of his married life was spent without his wife having any idea what his face looked like.